Protágoras

Protagoras (c.490–c.420 bc)

Protagoras was the first and most eminent of the Greek Sophists. Active in Athens, he pioneered the role of professional educator, training ambitious young men for a public career and popularizing the new rationalist worldview that was introduced from Ionian natural philosophy. But unlike his contemporary Anaxagoras, Protagoras was sceptical of the dogmatic claims of the new science. His famous formula – ’Man is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not’ (fr. 1) – makes him the father of relativism and even, on some interpretations, of subjectivism. He was also considered the first theological agnostic: ’Concerning the gods, I am unable to know either that they exist or that they do not exist or what form they have’ (fr.4). He was sometimes associated with the claim ’to make the weaker argument (logos) the stronger’.

1 Career

Protagoras came from Abdera, the city of the atomist Democritus. As a professional educator, he visited Athens several times and was closely connected with the intellectual circle around the leading statesman Pericles. He is reported to have drawn up the laws for Thurii, a pan-Hellenic colony in southern Italy, founded on the site of Sybaris in 444 bc under Periclean leadership. His extraordinary prestige, as the wisest person and greatest teacher of his time, is brilliantly portrayed in the introductory scenes of Plato’s dialogue Protagoras (see Plato §9). Protagoras there declares that he is the first Greek openly to offer moral and political training on a professional basis.

Protagoras’ agnosticism regarding the existence of the gods must have shocked many of his contemporaries. A widespread ancient tradition reports that he escaped from Athens after being condemned for impiety, and that he was subsequently drowned at sea. One version of the story claims that his books were publicly burned at Athens. Some scholars have doubted this report, on the grounds that in Plato’s Meno (91e) Socrates says that Protagoras remained in good repute until the end of his life. On the whole, however, the ancient tradition is likely to be correct. If so, Protagoras was (like Anaxagoras) one of the first victims of the popular reaction against the rationalist Enlightenment, whose most famous victim was Socrates (§1).

2 Teaching

In Plato’s Protagoras, Protagoras describes the content of his teaching as ‘good judgment in administering the affairs of one’s household and those of the city, so that one may be most capable of acting and speaking on public matters’ (319a). He there declares that if any pupil is not satisfied with the requested fee (which was certainly high), he need only go to a temple to swear how much he thinks the training was worth, and pay no more. The primary appeal of his teaching was to ambitious young men from wealthy families, who hoped to gain an advantage for their political career from studying with him. In historical perspective, the Sophistic movement initiated by Protagoras can be seen as the beginning of higher education in Western culture. The Sophists were the first professors without a permanent school (see Sophists).

Unlike some later Sophists who included the new natural philosophy in their curriculum, Protagoras seems to have focused his own training on practical concerns, and above all on eloquence and argument. He is credited with being the first to show that there can be an argument for and against every thesis (fr. 6a). Thus he is reported to have trained his students, like a modern debater, to argue both sides of every disputed question, and also to be able to praise and blame the same person (A20–1). We have in the Dissoi logoi (Twofold Arguments) an ancient collection of sample reasoning on opposite sides of issues concerning good and bad, just and unjust, whether virtue can be taught, and the like (see Dissoi Logoi). The extant text of Dissoi logoi is estimated to postdate Protagoras, but manuals of this type probably represent a tradition of antilogia or contradictory argumentation going back to Protagoras. It was presumably because Protagoras was so celebrated as a master of argument and refutation that Plato has selected him as Socrates’ opponent and victim in the duel of wits in the dialogue Protagoras.

Protagoras’ teaching is associated with the claim ’to make the weaker argument the stronger’. This is easily given a hostile interpretation: to make a bad case seem good, and thus to deceive a gullible audience. Enemies of the Sophists like Aristophanes certainly took this view of the kind of training that Protagoras inaugurated, and they regarded the moral influence of the Sophists as nefarious. Protagoras himself, however, seems to have been a staunch defender of traditional morality. This is indicated not only by Plato’s portrayal but also by his political role as legislator for Thurii. The contrast between nomos and physis, between conventional morality and the nature of things, was later used to undermine the authority of the moral tradition (see Antiphon; Callicles; Physis and nomos). If this contrast was used by Protagoras (as some scholars have supposed), it can only have functioned in favour of nomos and the customary moral tradition. For, as will be seen in §3, Protagoras denies the claims to absolute or objective knowledge associated with the notion of physis. For a relativist like Protagoras there is no knowledge of the nature of things except from a particular human perspective.

Protagoras was also a pioneer in the study of language and grammar. Two important grammatical observations are attributed to him: (1) the distinction of gender into masculine, feminine and neuter (A27), and (2) the distinction of discourse into prayer (or optative), question (interrogative), answer (indicative), and command (imperative) (A1, paragraph 53, where a more complex division is also ascribed to Protagoras). These grammatical distinctions were apparently developed in the context of critical comments on Homeric poetry in the name of orthoepeia or correctness of diction. Thus Protagoras is reported to have disapproved of the opening verses of the Iliad for using an imperative form (‘Sing, muse, of the wrath of Achilles’) rather than the optative, which would be more appropriate for a prayer (A29). And he seems also to have complained that Homer’s word ‘wrath’ (menis) should be masculine rather than feminine (A28). Plato twice alludes to Protagoras as an expert on the correctness of names (Cratylus 391c) or the correctness of diction (Phaedrus 267c) and he presents Protagoras as claiming that skill in criticizing the poets constitutes a major part of education (Protagoras 338e). The complex concern with language that is characteristic of Sophist practice thus clearly begins with Protagoras, but our evidence is too meagre for an accurate appreciation of his personal contribution.

3 Philosophical views

Protagoras is famous for two quotations. The best known is from a book entitled Truth: ‘Man is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not’ (fr.1). The other may be from a different work: ‘Concerning the gods, I am unable to know either that they exist or that they do not exist or what form they have. For there are many obstacles to knowledge: the obscurity of the matter and the brevity of human life’ (fr.4). There is at least a notional connection between these two doctrines, since the claims to dogmatic knowledge on the part of early poets and philosophers often invoke divine inspiration. Thus Parmenides, the most influential philosopher of the fifth century, presents his view as the revelation of a goddess. In rejecting any knowledge of the gods, Protagoras also rejects any claim to an absolute or god’s-eye knowledge of the truth.

Protagoras’ ’man-the-measure’ formula was interpreted in two different ways: (1) the subjectivist interpretation takes the thesis to claim that whatever anyone believes is true; and (2) the relativist interpretation claims only that whatever anyone believes is true for the person who believes it. The subjectivist doctrine (1) is rather easy to refute. For if all beliefs are true, then the belief that the man-the-measure doctrine is false must also be true. So if anyone doubts the truth of the man-the-measure thesis, the thesis itself must be false. This is the argument known as the peritropē, the claim that the thesis overturns itself. Plato in the Theaetetus interprets Protagoras’ doctrine as the relativist thesis (2): that what anyone believes is true for that person (see Relativism). Plato presents the peritropē argument as a refutation of this version also.

We do not know whether or not Protagoras applied his theory of truth to moral and political issues. Plato suggests that for Protagoras: ’whatever the city establishes as just, is just for that city as long as it judges so’ (Theaetetus 177d). This form of cultural relativism, which combines the recognition of different moral codes with respect for established tradition, is likely to be historically correct for Protagoras, since we find a similar regard for nomos or custom, in the face of cultural diversity, defended by Protagoras’ contemporary, the historian Herodotus. It would also be a convenient doctrine for an itinerant philosopher, who can thus endorse the established order in each society when travelling from city to city.

Other positions attributed to Protagoras may be connected with his relativist theory of truth. Thus it may have been a general reaction against dogmatic claims that led him to deny that the circle touches a straight line only at a single point, as is assumed in plane geometry (fr. 7). The paradoxical view that ’it is not possible to contradict someone’, which was later defended by Antisthenes (§4), was originally ascribed to Protagoras. If all opinions are true, then two speakers who seem to disagree cannot really be contradicting one another: they must be talking about different things.